A New Look for Yast

The Opensuse project is collecting ideas for a visual rework of the Yast management tool.

According to Yast developer Stefan Hundhammer, the motivation for the new design is the icon overload, unclear categories or disambiguation of individual modules. Usability surveys and mailing lists had revealed the issues. Now, the project is looking for a completely new view: "There might be more options than just cramming loads of tiny picitures into a window", says Hundhammer. Suggestions are welcome.

The Yast Control Center today: too many icons, unclear tasks, say users and developers at Opensuse.

Thomas Göttlicher from Suse called for people to join in with collecting ideas for a new Yast on the Opensuse mailing list. As this launched a major discussion that extended the focus and even touched on projects for reprogramming Yast, Yast developer Stefan Hundhammer had a second attempt, emphasizing that the issue was simply one of redesigning the Qt interface for the Yast Control Center.

Results of a brainstorming session among Yast developers. The modules below miscellaneous do not fit in any category at present.

There has already been a workshop on sorting the modules (Card Sort Study). And the Opensuse Wiki page for the new Control Center documents a variety of proposals and ideas for implementation.

The team is looking for new ideas. This proposal shows a related objects feature.

Free software covers such a diverse range of utilities, applications, and other assorted projects that it can be hard to find the perfect tool. We pick the best of the bunch. This month we cover Yast2 for Debian, KDE 4, Bluetooth headsets, and the Debian project.